With spiritual bodies, there are two main considerations: quality and quantity, or, in other words, how sophisticated the substance and structure are, and how big it is. A computer equivalent of this is estimating a CPU’s power by knowing what technological generation it belongs to, and how fast it’s clocked. The more sophisticated technology gives the greatest advantage, and within that, the greater clock speed the better. Comparing “size” alone, in this case clock speed, doesn’t tell you anything valuable. In spiritual terms, comparing spiritual beings by size gives you an important information only if you first look at the quality of structure, which primarily means the energy level and density of the substance it’s made of. One vajra-jewel might “unzip” into entire universes of astral substance, and yet it might look small, the same way a black hole or a neutron star might look small, yet its structure reveals the truth. It’s like comparing mainframe computers from the 1980s with the smartphones of today; an old mainframe is physically imposing but the smartphone is actually more powerful, because it’s all about structure. However, if you build a mainframe system out of modern building blocks, it will have the same power per litre of volume compared to the smartphone, and greater volume will produce linearly more power. This is what I mean by comparing quality first, and quantity second.

So, let’s imagine that physical volume units can be assigned to astral entities, which is not the case but I don’t know how else to formulate this so that it would make sense. A gaseous-form being with a volume of one litre is lesser than a gaseous-form being with a volume of ten litres, all else being same. However, one millilitre of crystal-form being might be greater than an arbitrarily large gaseous-form – and here I mean planetary sizes, because the quality is different and it’s like comparing ordinary matter which is mostly empty space, and comparing neutronium, which is nucleon-density, zero empty space. My observation, when undergoing initiation into vajra 20 years ago, was that the relation between ordinary astral substance and vajra is even more extreme than the relation between rarified gas and a black hole. So, the thing to have in mind is that when I speak of spiritual jewels, or vajra-stuff, it relates to astral matter like black holes relate to cooky jars. It’s literally mind-boggling density. I had the misfortune to have to deal with some corrupted spiritual jewels (yes, that can happen), and that’s the most wicked and malignant shit you can imagine. I’m not sure what’s the physics behind the corruption, but I do know that the creators of the jewels pledged them to Sanat Kumar, and something happened to them which corrupted their entire mass. Not only is that shit bad, it also caused accidents, when my girls cast a glance with their astral vision to see what the hell was it that wrecked my system so badly, and a few kalapas of that substance transferred into their astral bodies, and I had the opportunity to watch what happens when a trained yogi with years of experience dealing with all sorts of bad shit gets struck by that. It’s like watching microscopic black holes tearing through matter. Nothing they could do with astral spell-casting and shielding had any effect, because the “mass” of that shit was too great, although it looked like only a few particles. I had to intervene and transform those particles myself. Basically, if you can imagine black dust that’s as sharp as diamond dust, and as massive as singularity, and simply shreds through everything due to its mass, you get the idea. One kalapa of this substance expands into entire nightmare-worlds of ordinary astral stuff. The expansion rate is huge. I didn’t measure it, because I don’t have any quantifiable metrics at my disposal, but it’s like that zip-bomb file, which is a few kilobytes large but when you unzip it, it expands into terabytes of data, that was used in the BBS era to break a BBS when it tried to unpack the transmission. In order to deal with this kind of stuff you need to have the capacity to move the particles of this matter, in its compressed form, to “order” them around, to orderly decompose them into constituents of lower magnitude, and absorb and transform them in that state.

Why am I talking about this? Because I sometimes mention the spiritual jewels, and I know beyond doubt that almost everybody routinely misunderstands that, thinking that it’s some “normal” but “prettier” form of astral matter, like diamonds are a prettier form of coal. No, it’s not like that. Those “jewels” are not astral matter, they are supercompressed to the point of being another form of matter entirely. The world “causal” is usually thrown around in this context, because that’s how Vedanta classifies things – matter, astral, causal – but I’m not convinced that it makes much sense. Aurobindo’s term, “supramental”, is definitely more accurate, because this is substance that is superior to the mental plane (or, high astral, as I would more accurately name it). The way a black hole is physical matter compressed to such an extent that it goes beyond what matter is normally supposed to do, compressing a whole star into a mathematical point, while retaining its mass. How that works, nobody really knows. Also, in theory vajra is not supposed to be corruptible, although there are marginal scenarios which make it theoretically possible. For instance, if you have a being whose spiritual body is still astral, but contains spiritual jewels, this being as a whole can incarnate in the physical world, be deceived into thinking that this world was created by God, and pledge its spiritual powers and merits to the world’s creator and his intents with this world. I don’t know the actual process of commitment that ought to have been followed in order for such a claim to hold, but I know the aftermath – such beings appear to have been consumed into powering evil, and the jewels were so corrupted, probably due to the fact that they powered immensely sinful deeds such as deceiving other souls by providing a source of false attraction within this world, they had to be deconstructed and transformed at the kalapa level. Essentially, other than Sanat Kumar himself, those jewels were the nastiest, most dangerous things I have ever seen, and I wish to never have such “opportunity” again.

So, we have now established that spiritual matter can exist in many qualitatively and quantitatively different forms. The next thing to understand is evolution of the soul.

The first thing to understand about this is that majority of the Eastern religions assume there’s only one path, only one goal, and that evolution is basically the process of rubber-stamping, of having a soul conform to a pre-existing template of perfection, which is then called enlightenment. It’s either nirvana, or kaivalya, or moksha, but essentially, there’s an assumption that the sinful and bound souls are all different, but that the enlightened souls are all similar, or that they simply merge into a supra-reality where they lose any kind of personal identity. But really, what would be the point of that? To have the end-point reproduce the origin? Really? I don’t think so. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the souls go through vastly different paths and formative experiences, and as a result they are all vastly different. I don’t say “vastly different” like “they are different because they haven’t evolved yet to the point of perfection”, but exactly the opposite, that they have evolved into their own version of perfection. That’s why I have a problem with religions, because they have a template of sainthood. God doesn’t have one. Spiritual development is possible through imagining complex abstract ideas and acquiring knowledge; it could be sophisticated form of love felt for some other super-being; it could be strength, courage and loyalty shown to the ideals under grave pressures and hardships. It could be observation, empathy, identification, basically samyama on other beings and structures, where one extends his consciousness in order to encompass new things and possibilities. It could be challenging the preexisting notions and limits of the known, by testing new ideas, new practices, doing new things and learning from the results. Basically, you can grow on the path of the flower, the path of the warrior, the path of an angel, the path of a saintly iconoclast, the path of a concubine, the path of a scientist, the path of a sorcerer. You can achieve perfection by growing to be God’s love, or to be God’s sword. As I said, the end-results can be as vastly different as a female beauty-love-kindness-insight, or male strength-truth-justice-brilliance. The end-result can be a saintly scholar, a lover who touched God through sexual worship, or a musician who crystallized God into sound-emotion-insights. Obviously, there is great diversity in the good; it’s the evil ones who are so similar one can’t really tell them apart, because the spiritual structure of evil is usually quite simple and rudimentary. As complexity and sophistication grow, so do the differences between the beings. It’s sad that people usually imagine God as some predictable, simple but “good” being, when God is something utterly and incredibly other. Metaphorically speaking, God is the endless vault of treasures – of beauties, of knowledges, of powers, of unimaginable things that cannot be borne by human mind and emotions, and of which human tongue cannot speak. God is not a sea in which you drown in order to become the sea, nor are you supposed to be a drop of seawater which understands that it’s the sea. No. The better analogy is that there’s an endless landscape of wonders that is God, and you can be either a macro lens to explore and record this beauty by magnification, or a wideangle lens that captures the entirety of the landscape, or a video camera that captures beauty in motion, or a sound recording device that captures the sound in its perfection, or a library that manifests tomes of precious knowledge, or a soldier who protects the precious things with his life and sword when they are endangered, or Shakti listening to Shiva explain the intricacies of Yoga. Poetically speaking, spiritual stuff condenses into crystalline vajra-form once it touches God’s perfection, and becomes a perfect “lens” that holds some of God’s perfection, in shape of an individual point of view.